We got into Cairns at about 6am this morning and walked about 10 minutes to our hostel Gilligan's. When we got there, the guy told us we couldn't check in until 2pm! What were we going to do for the next 8 hours?! He told us we could go up to the common area on the first floor so off we went. I had a little nap and when I woke up, I saw that Hannah and Nicole had reappeared again and were chatting to Rikki. They had arrived in Cairns yesterday and we just on their way out for the day. We told them we'd meet up later for some drinks.

Rikki and I then went on a search for some food. We ended up in a shopping centre just down the road. We looked around the shops for a little while and then got some lunch. We still had a good couple of hours left before we could check in so we decided to go and find the Typo store that is about a 30 minute walk out of town on a retail park type thing. It was a straight forward enough walk and we got there in no time. Once there, we had a good look round and both ended up buying a couple of journals each as they were on a buy one get one free offer - perfect!

We headed back into central Cairns and by the time we got there we could check in - hurrah! We got to our room and chilled out for a while before trying to find Hannah and Nicole to organise our plans for the night. They weren't in their room so we went and got some dinner in the bar before heading back to our own room to get ready to go out for the night. We tried in vain to find the girls again but they still weren't back so we started drinking with Matilda and Charlie from our room. Matilda is from France and has been in Australia for about 5 months whereas Charlie is from Liverpool and has only been out here for about a month but he has a working visa and plans to try and live out here permanently.

Before the others started to leave, we tried once more to find the girls and this time they were in their rooms but already in bed! We started to chatting to them and ended up staying in their room for about three hours just talking. We arranged to go for a BBQ tomorrow evening and we would invite Lorraine, Phil and Karl - the other people for our Fraser Island tour - who we'd also seen were staying in Gilligan's. by the time we left there room, Rikki and I were both rather tired ourselves so decided to skip going out and headed to bed. We had a very early wake up call in the morning to get to the harbour at 7.30 for our Great Barrier Reef tour. Exciting times.